JONGSON PARK

Distractions actually serve a function in our daily routine. They help to decongest our mental pathways that we tend to overburden with our daily responsibilities. Imagine the work we have to do and the mental pathways required to travel in order to perform them, it’s like a freeway that starts to build up busyness, congestion and traffic. At a certain point, trying to get the same work done becomes more difficult because of the burden on the system – potholes, red lights, accidents. Distractions help alleviate that congestion and clear up those mental pathways for a fresh reset.

Distractions usually activate some other part of our overworked brain to alleviate activity and pressure. If your job requires to make difficult decisions, meeting after meeting, a distraction might be something that requires no decisions. If you’re working on a task that requires some kind of active writing you might indulge in a passive activity for a distraction. Instinctually we use distractions to relieve some of the overwork and fatigue we experience in those different parts of our mental pathways. So I’m suggesting instead of letting distractions subconsciously take control of our time, we can purposefully manage our distractions to actually be more productive.

Download the worksheet, read on to learn more

Distraction Management Worksheet

Itemize your distractions. Make a list of frequent distractions you run into. Then put a time frame next to those distractions.

Distractions could be, messaging a friend, getting a snack or making tea or coffee, scrolling a feed, attention to your pet, checking sports scores, listening to a song, checking sales. And “distractions” don’t necessarily have to be distractions like research, reading a book, working out, getting lunch.

In between your blocks of work, give yourself a “distraction” within the time frame you’ve allotted.

We’re taking control of the distraction by giving ourselves permission to do it and managing it by putting a time limit on it and removing the guilt associated with it. By not giving ourselves the permission or time to do it, it makes us want to overindulge in the distraction therefore making it an endless distraction. Because theoretically we’re not going to do it again, so we’re making a “one more minute” bargain with ourselves over and over again.

The benefits of managing distractions versus trying to avoid them

Improved focus during work time: By designating specific blocks of uninterrupted work time, we can create a focused environment that facilitates deep concentration and productivity. Knowing that designated distraction time awaits later can help reduce the urge to engage in distractions during work periods.

Increased self-awareness: By itemizing common distractions, we become more aware of the specific factors that divert our attention. This awareness is a crucial first step toward managing and minimizing those distractions.

Enhanced time management: Allocating time for distractions allows us to indulge in activities we enjoy without feeling guilty or overwhelmed. This structured approach helps strike a balance between work and leisure, ultimately leading to increased satisfaction and overall well-being.

Increased productivity and flowstate: By consciously managing distractions and maintaining a focused work routine, we are more likely to enter a state of flow—where we can experience heightened concentration and productivity. Flow state can lead to higher quality work and a sense of fulfillment.

Be as flexible or as structured as you need. The method allows us to tailor our distraction management to our unique preferences and work styles. By itemizing and categorizing distractions, we can choose activities that provide the necessary mental relief while still aligning with our personal interests and goals.

If you need a quick hit of motivation here are 10 easy ways to create some motivation. Read on for the hack.

1. Focus on fun
2. Do it with a friend or group
3. Remind yourself of the purpose
4. Make passion and energy the minimum requirement
5. Do it for someone you care about
6. Keep your promise
7. Make it a game, compete and stay challenged
8. Get encouragement or support from a friend or yourself
9. Set up a reward for yourself if you get it done.
10. Watch a video, read something that gets you excited or inspired.

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Motivation is a Mirage

Productivity used to be an up and down roller coaster for me. Sometimes I’d feel motivated and inspired to get stuff done and so easy to do. But the motivation would eventually fade or the activity would stop being energizing. Then I’d have to recuperate to build the motivation back up to try and get started again. But each time I repeated that process it got harder and harder to get back into it. I’d have to build up the motivation to more than what it was before. This rinse and repeat cycle wasn’t sustainable.

I questioned myself, why I couldn’t maintain the consistency. I just thought I must not have enough discipline, will-power or passion. But as I dug into the question I think one of the reasons for this up and down cycle was I was relying too much on motivation as the emotional fuel. So I started to change my relationship with motivation. This is what I mean, I began to see motivation as the spark plug not the fuel. The real sustainable fuel and end goal is momentum.

If you have a difficult time sticking to a habit or activity because you run out of motivation. I want to share a motivation hack that might be helpful, a different way to use motivation.

You might have noticed motivation seems to be temporary and depends a lot on feeling and emotion. It could be that we get inspired, encouraged, challenged, you want to make a change, we buy the new shiny equipment or program, or maybe we’re just in a good mood. Whatever it is, motivation doesn’t seem to last and tends to rely on external factors that are inconsistent and come and go.

The Motivation Hack

Try this, think of motivation as the initial kickstarter, just a spark to get yourself started. But don’t rely on motivation to be the everyday, sustainable fuel. Use motivation to create movement and ultimately generate momentum. Momentum is much more powerful and sustainable than motivation.

Motivation is supposed to be just used as the spark, not the fuel. It helps you easily start the action you want to get into. Use motivation to generate the movement.

Movement is the action you generate to build momentum. At first it will feel inconsistent and clumsy, and be easy to skip or write off. The decision to do it or not do it is a chore. Skipping a day, week is still risky that you might not come back to it. It’s not a habit yet, but keep doing it step by step and it will eventually become momentum. Use motivation where you can but motivation starts to fade over time, so you’ll have to ween off motivation to get into momentum.

Momentum is when you’ve done that action consistently enough to become a habit. The question of should I do it or skip it is no longer a chore but a natural, easy “green light”. Once you get into momentum, skipping a day or even a week isn’t so risky any more. It’s very easy to get back into it. Momentum is the sustainable, regenerative fuel that keeps you going consistently, with more energy in the long run.

Movement Tip: Set yourself up for success. For example, it’s a lot more effective in creating lasting changes to do 10 minute workouts for 7 days as opposed to trying to do 1-2 hour workouts you might do 2-3 times a week. The initial friction you’re trying to overcome isn’t the physical obstacle or effort it’s the decision making and change in routine.

Productivity is more than just task lists, to-do systems and productivity apps. Productivity is getting the most out of every minute you engage in something. And includes everything from work, to play, to socializing, to exercise, and everything in between, even watching TV or doing nothing.

To me productivity is all about flowstate. That’s why I call it “Flowstate Productivity”. It’s not enough to “get things done” like a productive task robot. It’s about bringing all of who you are to everything you do. Savoring every moment you’re in flowstate, even work. In flowstate you come away fully satisfied that you couldn’t have done it any better, been more present and the outcome is exactly how it should’ve been. You fully experience and engage in the moment.

In flowstate your riding the wave of your intuition and skills coming together to make decisions and creative choices to meet and exceed the demands of the moment with ease and simplicity. Each task doesn’t drain you, in fact it re-energizes you to take on your next activity. Your left with more energy throughout the day. Now imagine having this experience in every aspect of everything you do, from when you wake up to when you go to bed.

If you want to experience life like every moment is a super concentrated bomb of life and flavor. Go throughout the day with less stress and anxiety, get it down to near zero. And not just get things done, but get them done with excellence, with your full engagement and more satisfaction and fulfillment. If you want to feel like everyday is a gift, a reward waiting to be opened. Then I might have some things I can share with you that might be helpful.

Eliminating unnecessary anxiety and stress is the biggest key to maintaining your energy level throughout the day. We don’t even realize how much anxiety, stress and fear we’re managing while we’re doing something. It’s like a pain we’re ignoring or a bad smell we’ve gone nose-blind to. But we’re expending all our energy just to manage that anxiety and stress just to get through our day and what we’re working on.

Subjectively, I would say it feels like 70-80% of my energy is just on managing the underlying stress and something like 20% is left for the task. This makes it take longer to complete what I’m doing, makes it feel like I’m not really at my best and not very satisfied of fulfilled with what I’ve done.

Anxiety, stress, fear, worry is stealing your productive energy. When I was able to remove the underlying negative energy, every activity felt easy, felt so much more fulfilling, was more efficient, took less time to complete and I could easily go from task to task without any downtime. No more procrastination. I’m able to pack my day with so many different things to do. But I still had way more sustained and consistent energy throughout the day. Doing more, with way more energy. Zero stress, has given me almost 10x energy throughout the day.

And ultimately, more energy means it’s easier to get in and out of flowstate. I like to say productivity is knowing how to manage your flowstate. Knowing the keys to easily get into flowstate. Knowing what takes you out of flowstate. Knowing why you don’t have the energy to get you into flowstate.

Getting more flowstate productivity starts with understanding how to manage your energy levels. And the biggest energy drains are anxiety, stress, worry and fear.

Here’s my Top 10 situations that cause anxiety and stress that zap energy levels

1. Distraction from being present – replaying events in the past and thinking too much about things that haven’t happened yet.
2. Putting off decisions and procrastinating.
3. Micromanaging yourself and others.
4. Perfectionism – having to get everything right and the fear of making mistakes.
5. Overvaluing the result – identifying too heavily with the success or failure of an outcome.
6. Mismanaged expectations – either unrealistic or unreasonable.
7. Overthinking, over-calculating, over-analyzing, over-planning, over-trying.
8. Multi-tasking – worrying about other things you need to do while you’re trying to focus on what you’re currently doing.
9. Self criticism, judgment, negative self talk – second guessing what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and judging your outcome, results and performance.
10. Feeling like you need to prove yourself to others and letting other people’s perceptions, judgments and criticisms dictate how you feel and what you tell yourself.

Eliminating these things that steal the energy to fuel for your flowstate will 10x your flowstate productivity. And these are the the kinds of things I write about. So stay dialed-in as I share more thoughts and insights on how I’ve approached and overcome these challenges and obstacles in an attempt to reach higher flowstate.

That was a list of things that zap energy. Here are three basic ways to recuperate and refill some of that energy; better sleep, nutrition and physical activity. Which I’ll follow up with in more detail in future offerings.

(pssst…. just want to get the Flowstate Journal?)

It feels like this,

Do you feel stressed, anxiety, on the verge of overwhelm for the most of the day
Do you procrastinate a lot?

Do you find task switching challenging and brutally long, does it take you frustratingly forever to ramp up to a task, wind down a task, and require a lot of decompression time before going onto the next activity or task?

Do you wake up with an immediate sense of overwhelm of everything you need to do that day?

Does life and things you do seem unenjoyable, flavorless and unsatisfying and just a task you need to check off?

Are you absent from what you’re doing, losing a sense of presence and flow, not optimal in what you’re doing?

Do you feel like you have so much more to give but don’t know how to access it? Leaving so much on the table?

Do you have a endless list of things you want to do but it always gets pushed to the back burner? Which then adds to your guilt, regret and overwhelm, which makes it difficult to do anything else, which then creates a vicious loop?

Do you get easily drained and fatigued throughout the day? Have a very limited supply of energy? Easily irritable and annoyed?

Do you feel like you can’t really focus on what you’re doing? Can’t bring all of who you are, to everything you do?

But you want to,

Do you want to improve your productivity but don’t know where to start?

Do you want to feel like having an endless supply of energy throughout the day?

Do you want to be able to switch between tasks easily, fluidly without any downtime?

Do you want be able to finish tasks, projects, or work in a quarter of the time?

Do you want to have more sustained consistent energy throughout the day?

I’ve been there, done all of it.

I used to think anxiety was the norm, it was something I just needed to push through, grind out. No pain, no gain right? Wait a second, back up, before that I didn’t even realize I was under this constant low-key stress and anxiety. Like buzzing fluorescent lights you forget are there, cause your mind is constantly working to tune out. I thought that’s just how things are supposed to be. Are you feeling the same way? Asking yourself, when does it get better and how is this sustainable? How do you free yourself from stress, anxiety and overwhelm without having to become a monk and move to the mountains? I won’t say I can eliminate stress without having to live in a “bubble”. We encounter stress triggers everyday. But what I think I can help with is understanding, observing and building resilience to the stress that robs us of the energy, focus, intention and ability to be present in our daily lives. So that we can bring everything we are to everything we do, what I call Flowstate Productivity. Flowstate is the goal. The goal isn’t an outcome, result, expectation or measure of success. Those come because of Flowstate Productivity.

Achieving Flowstate Productivity you can,

• Be able to easily access and perform at your highest abilities, decisions and actions
• Reap a seemingly endless supply of energy, while constantly being recharged
• An anticipation of optimism, confidence and enthusiasm for everything you do
• Switch between tasks without any ramp up, wind down or down time.
• Be completely present in what you’re doing, losing track of time
• Be fully connected and engaged, feeling the full vibrance and flavor of the experience, being fulfilled and satisfied with the outcome

So how?

The first step in learning Flowstate Productivity is understanding and building an awareness of how you’re actually spending your energy. If you had a battery but only 20% of it was being used to power your electronic and 80% of it was being wasted by some software glitch or faulty component. You would think that’s terribly inefficient and want to figure out how to reclaim that 80%. The power source would never be running at full capacity, never getting maximum output, draining too quickly and frequently. What if our stress and anxiety is doing the same thing, stealing energy we could be using for focus, attention and effort? Everyone is different of course, but in my unquantifiable, subjective experience, it’s felt like 70-80% of my energy was being used to manage and try to keep my stress and anxiety at bay so that I could complete my work or activity. And since utilizing this concept, building an awareness of the anxiety and stress that was zapping my energy and then developing an action plan to reclaim it, it feels like my output has multiplied 10x – in a combination of increasing the output quality, decreasing transition times, and doing more and better work in less time.

One of the biggest aids in helping me build this awareness is a Flowstate Journal. I developed this journal to help me ground the things I was working on. Why was what I was working on so difficult? What was distracting me, what was I preoccupied with? Was I thinking of or hearing how people would respond to my work? I realized while doing this journal, there were two tracks running in my head while doing my work, one track was trying to focus and do the work, the other track was trying to manage and control whatever stress triggers were playing. This was the first awareness in learning how to silence that second track. And maybe you can imagine how much energy, focus, intention and presence I was able to reach being able to reclaim the wasted energy into the first track of doing the actual work.

I’ve created a Productivity Journal and good news because you’re getting this newsletter, it’s free for you to use. The Flowstate Journal was created in Notion a free, easy yet powerful and widely used app that allows you to create and manage your own productivity workspace. Enjoy and happy Flowstate Journaling!